Thinking of Grad School?

As I teach mostly upper division students nearing graduation, I am often asked about the whole grad school thing. It occurred to me that it might be beneficial to offer my perspectives here—both for the benefit of students and also to see if faculty in other fields have similar views or not. This will be coming of course from a science/engineering perspective, so feel free to chime in!

I typically start out by comparing my advice to that of parents giving their preteen the ‘puberty talk.’ It isn’t meant to be discouraging or scary, but informative. I start here because the first question to be answered is “Should I go to grad school?”

It is important that the Ph.D. should not be your goal in and of itself. You should view it as a means to an end, not the end itself. There are two issues here. First, passing your final defense tends to be rather anticlimactic, surprisingly. Your committee files out of the conference room door, shaking your hand with a hearty “Congratulations, Doctor!” This is cool. However, you still have to go home and fix dinner, go to bed, and get up to the rest of your life the next morning. If the letters after your name are the goal, then all of a sudden, you are faced with a need for a new goal or vision for your life, and some have found that depressing. However, if you have a vision, a purpose for the next steps, the anticlimactic feelings are still there, but the depressed feelings do not tend to accompany them.

Secondly, grad school has often been referred to as the “long dark night of the soul.” This is because a nearly universal truth is that you will run into a brick wall where you feel like you are making NO progress. This singularly thrilling period may continue for weeks, months or even years. Einstein quipped “if we knew what we were doing, we wouldn’t call it ‘research.’” It is common to ask yourself, “What am I doing here?” If you don’t have a clear vision or purpose for why you are pursuing the degree, the question tends to shift emphasis, “What AM I doing here?”

As I said, I do not intend to be discouraging. These experiences are normal. Therefore, knowing this going in helps to recognize and deal with it when it happens. At the same time, if this is completely discouraging, it is a wise idea to examine the issue and see if grad school is the best option for you at this time. Sometimes, it is appropriate for a different chapter in your life. Grad school is a real commitment, and not to be done lightly or because you have nothing better to do.

The Ph.D. is a noble pursuit, and is good for those who have a vision that requires it or those who have a passion for continued in-depth learning and research. In spite of what I’ve shared, I remember that time fondly and as the time of my adult life with the greatest freedom of schedule and chance to explore things at whim.

Tomorrow, I’ll share how to find a graduate program, and after that, how to choose a research professor.

SDG

Texas Governor Perry’s Encouragement for Faculty

Image source: Office of the Governor website

Today I had the privilege of being invited to, and participating in, a conference call for bloggers with Texas Governor Rick Perry. I have always promised to remain apartisan in this blog, so I will merely report on what he said without comment. One participant asked a question relevant to higher education and I report the question and the governor’s answer.

Questioner:  Do you have any words of advice or wisdom for faculty in higher ed and the university system in general as a lot of them are already feeling several years of budget crisis and with the stringent cuts that we are looking forward to over the next year? What would you say to faculty who are trying to make it happen for the students?”

Perry:  Yeah. Well, here I think we have some of the really fine institutions of higher learning in the country [here] in the state of Texas, and as we look at ways to make our institutions more affordable and accessible and really challenging the universities, and obviously their faculty as well, to come up with new and very expansive ways of creating more wealth. For instance, the commercialization of technology has not been as expansive at our institutions of higher learning as they should be. For instance, we had some statutes and historic ways of doing research where the professors and those researchers did not get to enjoy the wealth, if you will—they didn’t get to share in the proceeds that came from the commercialization of technologies, and I happen to think that the universities that really expand and make and allow, if you will, their faculty to be more engaged in keeping some of the wealth that they create with their research and what have you, that you’ll make Texas a more inviting place for professors to come and to continue to increase that ability to raise money. Obviously, our research capabilities are bringing federal dollars [from] the department of, for instance, the defense accelerated research projects—they use billions of dollars that are available there to create new and innovative… whether its treatments for disease or whether its protection of our troops, and all of those will, most likely, those innovations will come from our colleges and universities, so I full well expect our universities in the state of Texas will be stronger over the course of the years to come, and some of these universities in other states that continue to strangle, for lack of a better word, the innovation that their professors and instructors and researchers are allowed to be engaged in will fall behind and Texas will become a place where a researcher who truly wants to work, a professor who truly wants to work and be paid by virtue of the product they are putting out of the classroom, they’ll be rewarded with higher salaries and I feel very comfortable that we are going to continue to be a place that [faculty], whether it is professors or researchers, etc. want to come and live.

SDG